SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Moustafa Bayoumi
On Levi-Strauss
April 6, 2009
Am I alone in loving this book? Although I disagree profoundly with much of what passes for truth, observation, and calculation in Tristes Tropiques, I continue to hold this work in awe for its civilization-sized assessments, its self-conscious bravery, its grand ambition, and its even grander messiness. If you want to read in Tristes Tropiques certain truths about our contemporary twentieth-century world, you’ll end up closing the book out of frustration. It’s built out of an old-fashioned romanticism of the jungle and an environmental determinism that has rubbed so many in the seminar wrong way. The book seems a relic from an earlier age and one that has little to offer us today. But I don’t think Tristes Tropiques is really about travel. It’s about exile.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Corey Robin
On Levi-Strauss
April 6, 2009
I’m surprised that Ashley and others have seen in Levi-Strauss a quest for the pristine savage and a longing or nostalgia for the untouched and lost beauty of primitive tribes. It’s not that I don’t see those elements, but, like Lee and John, I thought that the overwhelming thrust of Tristes Tropiques (or at least what we read of it) was to mock that quest and longing. (I especially liked Lee’s comparison to Henry Adams; it seems apt.)
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Andrea Khalil
On Levi-Strauss
April 6, 2009
While reading this I have the feeling of retracing a familiar itinerary, an intellectual journey that has taken one from structuralism as a cerebral plaything to the more thorny questions of real historical enracinations, material reality of populations and the effects of ideologies on people who are differently positioned in relation to it. These passages take us once again on a road from Ferdinand de Saussure to Gérard Gennette to James Clifford to Edward Said and back again. It’s all in here, Levi-Strauss, structuralist, Marxist, one foot firmly planted in the old order where Rousseau would write in his “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” that savage peoples have a “heart that enjoys perfect peace and whose body enjoys perfect health” while, not surprisingly, in the same document showing his own shock that the revival in Europe of the arts and sciences comes from the most unexpected source, “This came at last from the quarter from which it was least expected. It was the stupid Musulman, the eternal scourge of letters, who was the immediate cause of their revival among us.” And he, Levi-Strauss, has another foot, as did Rousseau, of the injustice of the global situation’s political and economic inequalities, where “the substance of the weak is always used to benefit the powerful” (Rousseau’s “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”); while bemoaning the global order, liberal capitalism for Levi-Strauss, while never really grasping a language of critique. But this is perhaps not what he wanted to do anyway.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Michael Busch
On Levi-Strauss
April 3, 2009
Like a number of others, I was struck by the terrible timeliness of Claude Levi-Strauss' discussion of overpopulation in the chapter on markets. His observation that "When a community becomes too numerous, however great the genius of its thinkers, it can only endure by secreting enslavement," is particularly disturbing. Says Levi-Strauss, "Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social, and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered human." This is precisely the alarm sounded by human rights activists who warn about the increasing numbers of environmental refugees forced to flee from their ruined homes. As more and more people crowd into fewer and fewer spaces, they argue, the chances of violent conflict and ethnic cleansing rise.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Ilgin Yorukoglu
The Earth, the Market, the Population, and the People
April 2, 2009
This is really a complicated read - from anthropology to sociology, and, as Mehmet says in his post, from history to philosophy. Strauss has a complex understanding of time and space, and linearity- and how he goes back and forth between the white-man-talking-about-the-Primitive and a kind of dislocation within the ‘civilized’ post-war world. His complex understanding of time and space is evident in his reversing linearity by beginning the book (his journal/journey) with “An End to Journeying”. This complicated read, with this whole interdisciplinary voice, is full of thought-provoking suggestions. I will just write about this one thing that the part on an “overpopulated society being poisoned by its own density…” made me think about.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Patricia Mathews-Salazar
Triste Levi-Strauss
April 1, 2009
If its opening phrase is hard to bypass, the ending paragraph of the first American translation of Tristes Tropiques is at least equally surprising:
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Ashley Dawson
Tropical Contagion
April 1, 2009
Pankaj Mishra struggles valiantly to extract useful insights for the present moment from Tristes Tropiques. He’s aided by the fact that Lévi-Strauss’s text is remarkably incoherent, a mish-mash of Malthusian environmental determinism and prescient Marxist analysis of global commodity chains. Reading Mishra’s blog, I’m struck by the ease with which these two antithetical viewpoints are folded into one another, even in a writer who is so clearly aware of the atrocities of the global North. Perhaps Lévi-Strauss’s work remains timely, then, because its reactionary dystopian vision of Asian hordes and despotism resonate with contemporary fears among policy makers and the public in the overdeveloped nations about the potential collapse of global civilization (as evidenced in Jared Diamond’s best-selling book on this topic). How can we address the multiple crises of the global present and future without caving in to such Malthusian discourse?
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Lee Quinby
On Tristes Tropiques
March 31, 2009
Longevity is only one of the many remarkable achievements of Claude Levi-Strauss, but he has cast it in a rather gloomy light. Last November on the occasion of his 100th birthday, one of the numerous celebratory articles cited a poignant observation he made three years earlier at a mere 97: “We are in a world to which already I no longer belong. The world I knew, the world I loved, had 1.5 billion inhabitants. The world today has six billion humans. It is no longer mine.” Given his concerns in Tristes Tropiques about overpopulation and an inevitable loss of freedom accompanying a loss of sufficient space (148), his sense that the world in which he belonged has passed away seems apt. These days, explorers are less likely to dig their way into dense but disappearing rain forests than they are to delve into DNA to describe unknown territories. So too, overcrowded geographic spaces may be enlarged by the expansions of cyberspace in ways he could never have imagined in the mid-fifties. And yet it is probably inadvisable to take his lament at face value, since it was already present at mid-century.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 John Brenkman
Rousseau, Weber, Lévi-Strauss
March 30, 2009
For decades before writing Tristes Tropiques—and for, unexpectedly, even more decades since writing it: he celebrated his hundredth birthday last fall and a couple of years earlier published a hefty volume of recent (!) essays—Lévi-Strauss devoted himself to the rigors of science as a vocation, knowledge as a calling, in a manner quite in keeping with Max Weber’s famous essay “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” Matched with the companion essay “Politics as a Vocation,” “Science as a Vocation” strictly separates fact and value in outlining the specificity of the scholarly or professorial career. With reference to the social sciences and “those types of cultural philosophy that make it their task to interpret these sciences,” the scholar and professor, Weber wrote, must have “the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing...to determine...the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations.” Weber was as uncompromising in stating this principle as Lévi-Strauss was in practicing it before and after Tristes Tropiques. But Tristes Tropiques is something else.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Mehmet Kucukozer
The Weight of History and Philosophy
March 27, 2009
Although several writers come to mind—including Foucault, Said, and Sontag—when reading Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, two authors particularly stand out for me. First of these is Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a book you would most likely find in the travel section. Pamuk paints a city suffering from melancholy as the once great capital of a powerful empire is crumbling under the weight of history around the mid-twentieth century. For both authors, however, the “weight of history” is something that goes beyond simple nostalgia, as when Lévi-Strauss writes of Demra: “Behind the verdant landscapes and peaceful canals lined with cottages can be glimpsed the ugly outlines of an abstract factory, as if history and economics had managed to establish, indeed superimpose, their most tragic phases of development on these wretched victims…” (148). Certainly, Lévi-Strauss is more stark than Pamuk in describing concentrated power within a world system that has come to dehumanize large segments of the global population.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Tina Harris
On Levi-Strauss
March 27, 2009
Tristes Tropiques is simultaneously cynical and purposeful. It is a critique of ethnocentrism, of caste, of colonialism, of the destructive effects of capitalism, and of course as an adjunct to all of this, of travel writing (where, he claims, such critiques are often glossed over). If we are partly complicit in the destruction of other societies by traveling to and writing about them, then how do we go about doing so ethically? How can we anticipate the extent and effects of the power held by any individual reporting about a place?
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Andrew Bast
On Levi-Strauss
March 26, 2009
Maybe I don't get get it. Tristes Tropiques was a massive success for Claude Lévi-Strauss. Yet as I read it, I am struck with arrogance, pomposity, and frankly, a recurring whiff of armchair philosophizing. And this all came after one of the most perplexing opening lines I have ever read, "I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions."
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Agnieszka Kajrukszto
On Levi-Strauss
March 25, 2009
Lévi-Strauss writing is at once beautiful and offensive. It is as if he had a multiple personality disorder. In some passages his ego looms so large that it overshadows his opinions, because he disperses his observations as if they were Gospel. But perhaps such is the nature of an autobiographical writing. But underneath it all, is a dreamy humanism, a romantic sadness for lost civilizations, and a deeply felt critique of the modern world.
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